He had to cast about in his mind to remember what it was. His hand poised upon the rocket-firing key, he debated. Ah, yes! The third thing was that he had learned what emptiness was.
He pressed the firing-key. And the space-probe spouted flames and went on. Before the fuel was exhausted it had reached a velocity so great that it would go on forever through interstellar space. It would never fall back toward the sun, not even after thousands of years.
The knowledge of emptiness possessed by the five in the asteroid was different. A totally empty room is intimidating. A vacant house is depressing. The two-mile-long asteroid, honeycombed with tunnels and corridors and galleries and rooms, was like a deserted city. Those who had left it had carefully stripped it of personal possessions, but they'd left weapons behind, ready to be manned and used. They'd left a warning device to call them. The recall device was proof that the danger had not been destroyed and might return. And the plaintive call through all the solar system proved that it was returning.
There was irony in the fact that Earth had panicked when it seemed that intelligent non-human beings signaled from space, and that shrill disputes for advantage began instantly Burke reported no living monsters at the signals' source. The fortress and its call meant more than the mere existence of aliens. It was proof that there were entities of space who needed to be fought. It proved the existence of fighting ships of space; of deadly war in emptiness; of creatures who crossed the void between star systems to conquer and to murder and destroy.
And such creatures were coming.
Burke ground his teeth. Earth had fusion bombs and rockets which could carry them for pitifully short distances on the cosmic scale. This fortress was incomparably more powerful than all of Earth's armament put together. A fleet which dared to attack it must feel itself stronger still. What could Earth do against a fleet which dared attack this asteroid?
And what could he and Holmes and Keller do against such a fleet, even with the fortress, when they did not yet understand a single one of its weapons?
Burke worked himself to exhaustion, trying to unravel even the simplest principles of the fortress' armament. There were globes which were, obviously, the long-range weapons of the garrison. They were stored in a launching-tube at the far back of the compartment. But Keller could not unravel the method of their control. There was no written matter in the fortress. None. A totally unknown language and an unfamiliar alphabet would prevent written matter from being useful, ordinarily, but in technical descriptions there are bound to be diagrams. Burke felt desperately that in even the most meaningless of scripts there would be diagrams which could be puzzled out. But there was nothing. The builders of the fortress could have been illiterate, for all the signs of writing that they'd left.
Keller continued to labor valiantly. But there was no clue to the operation of anything but the transmitter. That was understandable because one knew where the message went in, and where it came out for broadcast. With the apparatus before one, one could deduce how it operated. But no one could guess how weapons were controlled when he hadn't the least idea of what they did.